


Magic heart

by nieded



Series: Ground Control [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Substance Abuse, Warlock learns the limits of his immortal parents, and the limits of his own heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:55:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27610049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nieded/pseuds/nieded
Summary: Before Warlock becomes a time traveller, he has a lot to learn about his parents and (mostly) himself.Or:Then he opens the door to the little eatery, and the sight of them just makes the room a little louder, the colours brighter. Angels and demons tend to shift light wherever they go, bathing their surroundings in brilliant light or blanketing darkness. In opposition -- together -- they stretch the colour spectrum to its full potential, making the reds redder than a dwarf star and the blues deeper than the clear ocean on a summer’s day in the South Downs. Or maybe it’s just the joy he feels at seeing two people he loves.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Warlock Dowling/OCs
Series: Ground Control [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1491128
Comments: 12
Kudos: 60





	Magic heart

“You want to introduce me to your parents?” Layla asks. She laughs, throaty and deep with her head thrown back. “I don’t even believe you have parents.”

Warlock sputters. “I talk about my parents all the time!”

She rolls her eyes and tucks a lock of hair back behind her ear, an errant curl that escapes the second she puts it away. “Sure, but they never sound real, do they?” 

He likes her American accent, flattened and tight vowels, hard on the consonants. It matches the ferocity of her temperament and sharpness of her wit. He thinks his dad would like her too.

“Besides, you know I’m not ready for that sort of commitment right now.”

He nods. “Right, yeah, I know. It’s just that they’re visiting from England and who knows when I’ll see them next.” He shrugs it off and jams his hands in his pockets, channelling his father as he slouches. “You’ll see, they’re fun.”

“They’re weird.”

Warlock shrugs in concession. He knows down to his marrow that this thing with Layla won’t pan out. Her head is always stuck looking backwards, his craning forward to the future. But sometimes he wants people to meet his parents if only to have further evidence for himself that yes, they do exist, that he exists, in what some might call an alternate reality.

He does not think about the only time his ex, Abe, had met them, the affableness Aziraphale had shown him and the judicious distance Crowley gave him the way he does with all newcomers who pass by like seasons in their long, long lives. Later, his dad had pulled Warlock aside and handed him a glass of wine, one hand on his shoulder. He took off his glasses. “He makes you happy, then?”

“Yeah, ‘course.” 

Crowley had bit his tongue and glanced at Abe from the corner of his eye. Whatever he felt in his aura, he did not share with Warlock. He nodded. “All right then.” 

After the affair and calling off their engagement, the year that followed full of sorrow and alcohol and the sort of seething anger only humans have, he never asked his dad why he hadn’t warned him, and Crowley never gave him an answer. 

It was only that following February when Warlock had just moved out of their cottage, back on his feet again, that he sat across Aziraphale in the small cottage kitchen. He’d lit the fire with a clap of his hands but cooked them lasagna and french bread from scratch, humming in appreciation with every bite in the silence. Warlock still couldn’t stand eating much, and he noticed that the usual wine had been stashed away now every time he visited. Crowley was stowed away upstairs for a week-long sleep away from the bitter wind whipping in off the coast and the sharp icy spray of rain and snow.

“I hope you don’t hold it against him,” Aziraphale said, setting down his fork. He folded his hands together and set them on the table between them. 

Warlock huffed. He did hold it against him. His dad had felt something that night which Warlock -- who had never mastered the art of auras -- had not. 

As if reading his mind, Aziraphale nods. “The hard thing about an occult being is that every human one meets has a little bit of tarnish on their soul. Just as everyone I meet has some speck of good, however small. Your dad and I saw different things in him that night.”

“But couldn’t you have told me?”

“Would it have changed how you felt about Abe?”

“Yeah, probably. It’d have saved me a lot of pain.” 

Aziraphale hummed and shifted in his seat, looking upward for the briefest of moments. “Or would you have judged him unfairly, not by the merit of his actions but on assumption?” He let the silence linger for a moment, fiddling with the corner of his napkin. “Crowley had hope, Warlock. I pray you won’t hold that against him. Hope is a rare and precious thing one must cling to when one has the opportunity.”

So, Warlock hopes. He hopes that maybe this thing with Layla will take off, or if not, that she stays his friend, and if not, that they part amicably and she goes on and heals and lives a good long life. He hopes one day she might open herself up again to love. 

And it can’t hurt to have her blessed by an angel. “No pressure,” he tells her. 

Layla rolls her eyes and throws her feet up on his coffee table. “Go over my literature review, and I’ll think about it.”

He already plans to, but he reaches out his hand anyway. “Deal,” he says as he grasps her hand in a firm handshake. It’s not soul-binding, not the way his dad does it, but he means it all the same.

  
  
  


Warlock was fifteen when he found out about the greater universe outside of their flat and his secondary school. Sometimes he’d pay attention to the news and historical lessons from school, but he was fifteen and self-absorbed and still trying to figure out if he _like_ liked Pepper or Brian or both. He had already decided he just wanted Adam as a friend, who once asked him about it because the Antichrist was used to having boys, girls, and once what might have been a ghost fawn over him. Warlock had to explain that being raised by two supernatural entities kind of took the shine off of things. He couldn’t explain, however, why he thought Pepper’s ferocity and righteousness were just as attractive as Brian’s foolishness. Still, he spent his weekends in Tadfield squashed between his friends feeling confused and sexually frustrated. 

Then Adam’s mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and all of those other things felt so miniscule and microscopic in the face of the Young family’s grief. 

The day Adam told them, they were sprawled about their hideout. They had outgrown sword fighting with sticks and playing witches -- now that they knew a real witch -- and were more interested in comics and footie and recording short films on their phones. But Adam wasn’t interested in those things the day Warlock learned about the universe and its peculiarities. Instead, he threw himself down on his makeshift throne and started to cry.

“Couldn’t you just make her better?” Warlock asked. He’d seen Aziraphale do that before, cure scrapes with kisses and will traffic lights to just hold for one second longer while someone sped through the intersection. Surely, if Aziraphale could do that, Adam could do anything.

“I tried,” Adam said, clenching his jaw. He sucked in a sharp breath and sat up taller, and nobody said anything about his trembling lip. 

“Well if you can’t, then I know Aziraphale could. He’s an actual angel!”

“Yeah!” Brian had said, jumping up. “Let’s go tell him. He’ll fix it.”

Wensleydale put his book down in his lap and bit his lower lip, hesitating before speaking. “You know, that’s not how it works in the comics. Saving a life like that costs something, like another life.”

“Shut up. Those stories aren’t real anyway,” Brian said, standing up. He grabbed Adam’s arm and yanked him off his throne. “Let’s go.”

Pepper -- who did not believe in magic despite living in it every day of her life, and who was wiser and older than them all despite being the exact same age -- didn’t say a word but looked at Adam with pity. 

They all stomped through the woods, but it lacked their usual impervious energy, and they stopped at the edge of the clearing where they could see Aziraphale and Crowley waiting for them at the gate to the back of Jasmine Cottage. They were, as usual, in stark contrast to one another, down to the way they dressed to the mild-mannered expression on one and the scowl on the other. Warlock, who had spent fifteen years under the thumbs of an angel and demon, could see the tightness in both their eyes the way the others could not.

“Ah, young Master Adam,” Aziraphale said. He called everyone Master and Madam in a way that made them feel important and not at all a bit silly. Adam straightened up. “I believe you had a question for me. Let’s take a walk.” 

The rest of the four all stepped in line behind him, but Anathema appeared from inside the house. “Come in for tea!”

“But--” Pepper protested. She looked to Adam who waved them off. Aziraphale gestured for him to walk down the path and the rest of them sulked their way through the gate and back into the house. 

Warlock was last in line and stopped by his father’s hand on his shoulder. “You’re with me,” Crowley said. Warlock swallowed and nodded. 

The sun had started to set at that point, and the stars began to peek out and glimmer the way they couldn’t in London. They sauntered along the outskirts of the clearing until Crowley stopped at random and snapped his fingers, a soft tartan blanket appearing which he draped on the lawn. He plopped down and crossed his ankles, leaning back on his elbows. Warlock resented him at that moment, just a bit, that he could conjure objects from thin air and walk free without care or the looming thought of death. “You could save her, you know,” he said.

His dad nodded though he stared upwards at the night sky. “I could,” he said. “Come sit.”

Warlock sat down next to him and crossed his legs, picking at the blades of grass peeking around the edges of the blanket. “Will you?”

“No.” 

“Well, that’s fine. Dad will.”

Unmoving, Crowley let out a soft sigh. “No, he won’t either.”

At fifteen, Warlock was bullish and temperamental. He was loud and demanding and stubborn. In a lot of ways, he was like both of his dads in one fragile, human package. And he was furious. “But you have to help Adam! He can’t do it himself like you can. You don’t get to decide if someone dies or not just cos you get to live forever!”

Calm as ever, his dad nodded. “You’re right. I don’t get to decide who dies or lives. I don’t mess with ineffability.” When Warlock opened his mouth to protest, he lifted a hand. “There’s a reason Adam limited his powers after that day at the airfield. What happens if he saves his mum? If she lives now, will he just go on saving her and his dad and you and all your friends for the rest of eternity?”

“Why not? Won’t you save me?”

Crowley turned to look at him and stilled. He had his glasses on, but there was a pitched tightness around his mouth. “It’s not up to me. Almost sixteen years ago, I thought I was going to save the world. I was going to stop Armageddon, a whole flaming war between Heaven and Hell. And in the end, the world didn’t end, but I had hardly anything to do with it. Instead, I got you.”

Warlock sucks in a sharp breath. His face grows hot. “Thanks,” he says, bitter. “Didn’t realise I was second rate.”

“You’re not. Bless it, you’re not. I wouldn’t trade you for the world. I wanted one thing, but instead, I got the thing I needed. You.” He tapped Warlock’s shoulder and pointed to the sky. The stars were out in full. “Look up. You see that star, the reddish one next to Orion’s Belt?” Warlock nods. “I put it there. It’s dead. If we flew up there, we’d find empty space and stardust, the debris of a supernova. Yet billions of light-years away, we still see it shine.” 

“This is a dumb metaphor,” Warlock said, but the fight had left him. He rested on the blanket, his head on the hard earth and his eyes to the stars, his favourite place in existence. 

“Immortality is a bust. All the things I’ve made and put my hands on, boom!” He fanned his hands out like a firework. “One day, it will all turn to dust. I think the occult part of Adam knows this. It’s why he can’t fix her. It wouldn’t be right.” Crowley spoke with conviction, confident in a way he often wasn’t, not like Aziraphale who still had blind faith in the goodness of the world. Warlock’s dad was a doubter. To be so sure meant he had seen that truth first hand. He’d touched things with his bare hands, loved them, and watched them turn to dust.

In that moment, at age fifteen, Warlock had the first inkling about the universe beyond him, his dad’s long life, the things he’d have seen, the shadows that lurked in the downturn of his mouth or the startled gasp waking him from sleep. He looked up at the stars and wanted to touch them, see all the things his dad had made before they all burned out.

“I’m going to go up there one day,” he said, and as he spoke a weight settled on him. It wasn’t just a fantasy. He was going to go up to space.

His dad smiled and stared at him, fond and full. “‘Course you are. I wouldn’t expect anything less from my kid.” 

  
  


Adam changed after the funeral and they all grew apart. He packed a single rucksack for his gap year and hopped on a bus. The next anyone heard from him, he was in France, and then the Alps and later Germany and Austria. Mr Young and Anathema and Aziraphale all worried.

“He’ll be fine,” Crowley often said, unperturbed. “He’s gotta figure himself out. Even Jesus spent most of his life as a carpenter before he was a saint.” 

Warlock didn’t have much reason to go back to Tadfield, not without Adam, who was the glue to their little group. And the hot wiggling feeling he felt standing next to Pepper dissipated over time. “I’m going to join the Peace Corps,” she announced in their group chat.

“I’m going to Imperial College,” Wensleydale said. 

“I’m taking on an apprenticeship at my uncle’s mechanic shop,” Brian said. “I’m moving to South London in a week. Wanna come check it out?”

Warlock was meant to be sorting through all of his things before moving in the fall to the University of Glasgow on scholarship to study physics. Instead, he found himself bumming around Brian, watching him do simple things like oil and filter changes. He’d swapped ice cream stains for grease, and Warlock -- who had always been a finicky child -- suddenly found the tear in Brian’s jeans and the scuffs on his shoes all very appealing. He rode the bus back to Mayfair in the evenings, chipping off his nail polish, full of stomach-clenching desire. 

Warlock had not dated, and his limited experience with romance came from watching TV dramas on Netflix and the very skewed example of his parents. They were two immortal beings who lived fifteen minutes apart in their separate quarters, who still courted through date nights and flirted over theatre, who sometimes could go days or weeks without seeing each other before picking up again like no time had passed. Their romance was smooth and worn down, as inevitable as the sunrise. As far as Warlock knew, they’d just always been together.

He watched them one evening argue over the wine. Nanny Ash was on her way over for dinner, and Crowley had promised her he’d cook with his dubious culinary skills. Aziraphale rolled his eyes and vowed to supervise, and there they were arguing over wine pairings while the hollandaise on the stove burned. The doorbell rang, and Warlock leapt up from his stool to answer the door.

“Nanny!” he said, reaching out for a hug. It was hard being seventeen and sullen all the time, and Nanny Ash made it so easy to open up. She never once made him feel small now that he’d outgrown the need for a nanny, but she never made him feel like he was too old to keep her either.

Aziraphale had the decency to shout over his shoulder, “Hello, my dear!” before returning to their argument, and Nanny Ash sighed and plopped down on the couch, patting the seat next to her.

“Those two,” she said, exasperated.

“Tell me about it. I have to live with them.”

“Hah!” she said. But then she smiled, glancing at the two in the kitchen with a small private smile. “I remember how lovesick your dad was before he told Aziraphale how he felt. Now look at him. Still just as lovesick.”

Warlock paused, his whole world view tilting. It was a tremendous shock to find out they hadn’t just sprouted from existence in love with each other, more than finding himself at Armageddon or discovering his parents were angels. When he said, “But they’ve known each other forever,” Nanny Ash heard hyperbole, but he really meant they’d been around before time itself existed. He just assumed they’d always been together.

After that, he spent his last summer mornings as a boy texting Nanny Ash questions like, “But when they did they get together? Was dad with anybody before? What about my mum?” He’d never asked about his mum before. He just assumed he’d been adopted to a rather established ethereal couple pretending to be men. 

But his evenings were spent behind the back of a mechanic shop, digging his fingers into the thighs of his jeans to stop the aching need he felt from spilling all over, watching Brian slide under a car on a dolly, his long legs he’d just grown into stretching out for miles, his shirt rucked up and his jeans slung low. The back of Warlock’s throat felt parched. They pretended poorly that their little group hadn’t collapsed the year before, that Adam wasn’t gone and Pepper wasn’t out saving the world. This summer was just a lark, and next weekend they’d be back in the woods playing the best games. 

He kissed Brian in the alleyway a week before leaving for Glasgow. Their shoes scuffed against each other, and his palms scraped against the brick wall. He didn’t know where to put his hands and was too afraid to press his body down and against that long expanse of stomach he’d fantasised about. Brian fisted his hands in Warlock’s shirt, not touching him but clinging all the same. His lips were chapped, and the little gasps escaping from his mouth made Warlock keen.

Warlock left for college and they didn’t talk about it again. He heard from Wensleydale via text that Brian had a boyfriend, and when they all met up over Christmas hols, they locked eyes for a moment before fist-bumping and moving on. Besides, Warlock had already started something tentative and fragile with Abe, who was older than him by a few years and enigmatic and wild and left Warlock’s heart high in his throat.

  
  
  


After he called the engagement off, he got drunk. It was the sort of drunk where his fingers went numb, and he was too tilted to stand up and make it to the bathroom when he started to vomit. It was the sort of drunk that went on for days, through the weekend and the next week and the week after that, the sort that resulted in several missed calls and emails from his academic advisor which forced the university to call a Warlock’s emergency contact. It went roaring on when the door to his locked flat opened without so much as a snick and a pair of well-worn Oxfords appeared in his line of sight. A strong set of hands hoisted him up by the armpits and caught him as he stumbled down the steps to the Bentley waiting out front. They guided him into the backseat and cupped the crown of his head for the entire hour’s ride to South Downs while he cried and shook and begged the demon in the driver’s seat to stop the fucking car, just stop.

He woke up that evening in the guest bedroom of his parents’ cottage with what felt like a bludgeon to his head and a hole in his heart. He stumbled out of bed and stood mostly upright, one hand on the wall and the other covering his face. Warlock made the long trek down the stairs in his bare feet and his boxers, through the foyer to the kitchen, around the endlessly long counter which held up his weight until he got to the cellar door. He missed the last several rungs on his way down the ladder and found himself face-to-face with a traitorous snake and an empty wall of wine racks. It was all gone, the wine Aziraphale had curated over centuries that once took up a room in the back of his bookshop, and was instead replaced by his father leant up against the wall, eyes luminous by the fire lit in the palm of his hand. 

“Where the fuck is the alcohol?”

“Go to bed, Beast.” 

“Fuck you, where is it?” Warlock careened backward and caught himself on the ladder. He snarled and made to swing at Crowley but missed. He was angry. Fuck, he was furious. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he hissed. “You just snap your fingers and get whatever the fuck you want.”

His dad grabbed his wrist during the next swing and swept his foot behind Warlock’s ankle. They both went down on the damp stone of the cellar floor. If Warlock had been more sober, less raw and scraped and lacerated, he would have caught the bruised look about his dad, the redness outlining his serpentine eyes, the stark reminder that once a long time ago he’d lost everything in a fall and had been crawling upward ever since.

Instead, Warlock pounded a weak fist against his chest and sobbed. “You don’t know what it’s like. You could just make this all go away.” He could stop time, rewind to six years ago, snap his fingers and disappear that arsehole and his enigmatic smile and the feeling that bubbled out Warlock every time he looked at him. He could take away the pain and the sobriety and just numb him down. “Just make it stop, please.”

His dad swallowed and looked upward, resting his head against the cold stone wall. He shook his head and held him tightly with a bruising, fearful grip. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, his voice hitching.

“But you could. I know you could.” Warlock heard his dad’s jaw clench, the click of his teeth as he bit his tongue. He waited for him to say something, anything, to stop his heart from bleeding.

Instead, his dad took a slow, stuttering breath, grasping for the right words. He did not tell his son he could make it better, clap his hands and rip the despair away. He did not have an anecdote or a joke about humanity. Instead, he sat in silence, searching in his endlessly long memory for anything that could make this better.

What Crowley did not tell Warlock was about the bender he went on from 1967 to 1975 which started in the backroom of a club in Soho with one Sargeant Shadwell and a razor blade and ended in the small flat the Scotsman had been renting with an overdose and discorporation. In between, Crowley spent the time flitting about Soho, high and angry and hurt, looking for a fight with Aziraphale that never came. The drugs kept him occupied enough that he didn’t think about the thermos locked in his safe, and every time he thought about a particular conversation in the Bentley, lit by neon lights and the promise of _someday_ , it was just easier to turn to cocaine than _think_. Decades later when Shadwell told Crowley he looked just like his father, he meant the man he found lifeless in his bathroom. 

Crowley did not tell Warlock about the time he woke gasping and screaming, clawing his way out of a pit of boiling sulfur where Duke Ligur greeted him with a smile. “Boss ain’t too happy with you, Crowley, wasting a corporation like that. You better do something big to make it up to him.” This resulted in the three years Crowley worked miracle-free, slipping into municipal buildings and behind construction lines during the creation of the M25, three years where he avoided Soho and Aziraphale and Shadwell who would have seen a ghost. The first three months were the worst. He had a new body but all the same addictions, the clawing anxiety and doldrums which swept him in turns, the despair that swallowed him up in the quiet hours of the night when it was just him, the silence, and the thermos. He did not tell Warlock that the night he discorporated was the night that scared both him and Shadwell into sobriety. 

What Crowley did not tell his son was about the forty decades of history he had with one Sergeant Shadwell before he passed, that when he told Shadwell he was _clean living,_ he meant it.

Instead, fumbling for the right words, he told Warlock about the day he brought him home in a panic, how he had miracled diaper after diaper away but the smell still lingered, and the baby -- _his baby_ \-- still cried and howled in discomfort. He learned he had to do things the human way, that care took _work_ , that love stemmed from effort and time. He pressed his lips to Warlock’s forehead like when he was a child. “I can’t miracle this for you. It won’t make you better. You have to make yourself better.”

Warlock hated him. He hated his platitudes, and that hatred went on and on, lashing out like solar flares looking for a target to burn. He hated him through the chills and the tremors. He hated him in his lucidity and feared him in confusion, and he told him loudly, repeatedly, shouting until his throat went raspy and sore. 

“Hey, Beast,” Crowley had said one morning a week into detox. He sat at the end of Warlock’s bed, stiff and uncertain. He reached to brush back his sweat-soaked hair but stopped.

“Hey, Dad.” Warlock felt weak. Defeated. The fight had left him, but the despair remained.

“All right?”

His whole body ached, and he was exhausted, sleeping in fits. He’d been awake for so long, but only remembered bits and pieces, his dad’s lullabies and the soothing chilled hand of demonic touch. His dad had been there the entire time. He nodded, sucking in a deep breath. Warlock tasted the ocean salt and the smell of zinnias from the garden. Someone had drawn the blinds, the sun still too bright, but with a warmth that was inviting. He nodded. “Yeah, I’m all right.”

It took him another two months to recover enough that he had the will and desire to get out of bed. He went out at night in his boots and a sweater, his hair grown long again and matted against the back of his neck. He stopped next to his dad who stood in the garden with his arms folded across his chest for warmth, and he pointed up at the night sky. “That one.”

It was an old game. Without missing a beat, Crowley answered, “Delta Circini. B class. We’re lucky to see it now. It’ll be gone in the next million years. How about that one?”

“Too easy. Sirius. M class. I think that’s the first star you ever taught me about. That one.”

“Nameless, though I used to call it _et cor_. It’s just a little M class in this galaxy with a solitary planet orbiting about.” 

“And what about Alpha Centauri?”

His dad sighed and closed his eyes. He didn't need to sigh. He didn’t need to blink. He did it anyway, a facsimile of being human. “I think had I known you and your dad back then, I would have called it _cor meum_.” 

  
  
  


Boston in the summer is hot and humid, the kind of weather his one dad withers from -- “But the books!” -- and in which the other revels. Layla complains about her curls frizzing in the heat, but Warlocks loves looking at her. She has these big flyaways that frustrate her to no end, inviting him to smooth them down. Her dark skin glistens in the sun, and he pales beside her, sweating, his hair cut short to hide the fact that it’s thinning. 

He tells her to dress casually, and they leave her little apartment side-by-side, their separate hands occupying the space between their bodies. She wears a sundress, and he puts on his favourite space shirt, the button-down with moons and spaceships in miniscule. One might think they’re just polka dots unless they got up close. “You’re such a nerd,” she chastises. His snakeskin boots keep pace with her heels as they walk down Centre Street. 

“Your dad is an astronomer?” she asks. She’s nervous. He can by the way she adjusts her purse over and over, shifting the strap, hiking it up, flipping it from side-to-side. 

“Yeah, something like that.” He’s a lot of things, Warlock thinks, a starmaker, a retired demon, a husband and a father. “I grew up looking up to him a lot. I think he was a bit baffled by it, honestly.”

She hums as they turn the corner to the bistro. “That’s sweet.” She’s nervous about meeting him, and Warlock can tell.

For him, seeing his parents feels a little bit like coming home, no matter what city or state or country they meet. Warlock has been living in Boston now for the past four years, and it always feels a bit disorienting. The city has old touches of colonialism, and the natives speak with soft Rs and broad vowels while still sounding so foreign. Sometimes Warlock walks Beacon Hill with his eyes closed, feeling every bump and ridge of the cobblestone, and pretends he is in London, a bandage to salve his homesickness. 

Then he opens the door to the little eatery, and the sight of them just makes the room a little louder, the colours brighter. Angels and demons tend to shift light wherever they go, bathing their surroundings in brilliant light or blanketing darkness. In opposition -- together -- they stretch the colour spectrum to its full potential, making the reds redder than a dwarf star and the blues deeper than the clear ocean on a summer’s day in the South Downs. Or maybe it’s just the joy he feels at seeing two people he loves. They have their heads together, assessing the menu, Aziraphale’s arm draped over Crowley’s shoulder with a hand on the back of his neck. Without lifting his head, Crowley’s eyebrows raise as he glances at him over his glasses, and Warlock feels at once like a teen again, sneaking out of the flat to only find one of them waiting for him on the ground level, caught. 

“C’mon, this way.”

He doesn’t take her hand. Later, back in her apartment with the narrow galley kitchen and chipped tiles, past the bathroom with the open shower in a feeble attempt to make the cramped square footage feel more spacious, she will tip him back onto the mattress laughing. “I’m so fucking proud of you,” she’ll say, kissing him on the mouth. She’ll mean it without remorse. She’ll miss him but not enough. He’ll think about her as he packs up his little flat and turns in his keys to the university, but it won’t be enough to make him stay when it’s time for him to go.

They reach the little corner booth where his dads have tucked themselves. It’s been a long time since he’s introduced anyone to them, and he’s startled to see they don’t look that much older than him now. It’s plausible that Warlock just looks old for his age, his early-onset widow’s peak not helping matters. It could be that despite the old waistcoat and bowtie, Aziraphale looks decades younger when he looks up and smiles, radiant as the sun skimming the snow-crested Alps. 

“This,” Warlock says without flourish, “is my friend Layla. And these,” he gestures to the two men-shaped entities, “are my parents.”

Crowley gives a little wave though he makes no move to meet her, but Aziraphale stands and grips her hand like they’re old friends. “I hear you have a PhD in astrophysics,” he says by way of greeting, eyes bright and the corners of his mouth mirthful. “I don’t have the head for it, not like the rest of you --” At this, he gestures from Crowley to Warlock, “but I do have some old first edition publishings of Sadi Carnot.” 

Layla lights up. “Really?”

“Come sit. I’ll tell you all about it.”

Warlock exhales the breath he’s holding and slides in next to Crowley. His dad shoots him a look and bumps their shoulders together. Warlock presses his lips in a thin line and shakes his head. “Nuh-uh,” he protests. “I’m not going to tell you.”

Crowley shoots him a look, glancing between him and Layla who sits across the table next to Aziraphale, deep in conversation. 

Warlock shakes his head. “Nope. It’s not about that.”

“But you do have big news.” 

Warlock would chalk it up to demonic telepathy, but he knows he’s never hidden his emotions well. The excitement buzzes off of him, every molecule vibrating. He grins and shoots his dad a conspiring wink. “It’s something better,” he says before flagging down the server.

“What would you like, my dear?” Aziraphale asks.

Layla, who was too absorbed in their conversation about proper citations and primary sources, flusters for a moment. “Come back to me.”

So Aziraphale orders himself the monte cristo. “And the croque-monsieur for my husband with a side of the fried pickles--”

“I’m not going to eat them, angel.”

“Yes, but Warlock will, and I suppose you’ll want the nachos as well.” He says it with a downturn of his mouth as he looks at their son. 

Warlock, unperturbed, steals across the table and snatches the menu from Aziraphale’s hands. He skims the appetisers and picks at random. “And, uh, the arancini and an order of the bruschetta too please.” 

“I can’t believe you still eat like this,” his dad says.

“Oh, angel, let him get what he wants.” It’s an argument that is well-rehearsed and worn down with repetition, the defeated battle cry of two parents who have fought and failed to get their child to eat a vegetable well into his late thirties. 

“And what to drink?” the server asks. 

Before he can whip out the wine and beer menu, Crowley dismisses him with a wave. “Water for the table will be fine.” 

“And for you, ma’am?”

Layla considers the spread of food Warlock ordered, having dined with him enough times to know everything will be sampled, but nothing will be finished. “I’ll just share with him.”

He watches her throughout dinner, the way she sits across from him, not next to, setting her boundaries, the way there are ghosts around her like buffers, preventing him from getting too close. He thinks he might love her but for the things that stand between them, her tenacity, her brilliance, her passion for physics and not for him. They fit together like two old jigsaw pieces, their edges blunt and worn down. They fit because they’re similar, not because they match.

Warlock has his own barriers, his own lines drawn in the sand. Warlock is making his own distance. 

“Well, are you going to tell us what it is?” his dad asks, snapping his fingers in front of his face. "I’m impatient.”

Aziraphale and Layla pause their conversation and look at him expectantly. “Tell us what, dear?”

It’ll feel real when he says it, he thinks. He takes a deep breath. “I’m moving back to London after I finish my doctorate.”

“What, really?” Laya asks, more perplexed than anything. He’s been keeping this secret held close to his chest.

“I’ve been offered a job with a private company, Astronautics Orbital, and they have a branch back home.” 

“How wonderful,” Aziraphale says, fumbling for his water glass. “I think a toast is in order.” 

They raise their glasses, though Aziraphale has to nudge Crowley to pick up his cup. He’s too entranced looking at Warlock. “To a new path,” he says, clearing his throat, the one who taught Warlock how to carve his way, the one who taught him perseverance and faith, even if only in himself.

“And a new adventure,” his other dad says, the one who taught him how to heal after the ugliest of wounds, the one who taught him that warmth and compassion are free to give but respect has to be earned. 

Layla lifts her glass and smiles. “To Warlock,” she says. 

His dad looks at him and cups a hand around his head and draws him close, as though he were small again, just a boy begging to go to school, to be free. Warlock remembers his eleventh birthday when he stood straddling the prime meridian, leaving the Royal Observatory short of breath and full of wonder. He’s always been a changeling child, just a glimpse in time for his parents. But breaking the barriers of time and space are for him and him alone. 

_To my first love_ , Warlock thinks, raising his glass. 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know. I didn't mean to write more of this universe, but it hit me like a fever dream. No beta because I probably wouldn't have posted if I waited.
> 
> You can follow me on tumblr @nieded. <3


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